- An old thread, but a goodie → What is a piece of writing, on the internet (i.e. not a book), that you return to or at least consider foundational? ※ One of my picks: this pair by Allie Brosh, aka Hyperbole and a Half: Adventures in Depression + Depression Part Two. PS. Wherever you are, Allie Brosh, I hope you are well.
- “Gaming the lottery seemed as good a retirement plan as any…” → Jerry and Marge Go Large
- I had no idea tamales were a Mississippi Delta fixture. → How the humble tamale came to represent a region and its people. ※ I was aware of this concoction at the other end of the taste spectrum, but not the story behind it: The Creator of Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa Cake Confesses. ※ And, while on food (or should I say “food”?): I Made Ranch Gummy Bears And You Should Too.
- I can’t tell if this is satire or not. Or if that makes it better or worse. → Christians Against Dinosaurs
- “A collection of good news, positive trends, uplifting statistics and facts — all beautifully visualized by Information is Beautiful.” → Beautiful News. ※ See also, an online magazine founded by David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne): Reasons to Be Cheerful, “A self help magazine for people who hate self help magazines.”
- One of the more interesting profiles of an almost accidental, definitely weird, celebrity I’ve read → What Happened to Val Kilmer? He’s Just Starting to Figure It Out. ※ A fantastic profile of an underrated musician: The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic.
- From the Clamor to your ears → Sweet Music Comes Across the Sky interprets the songs of Thomas Pynchon (Thanks, Reader S.) ※ Apocalypse Grooves maps Coronavirus proteins to sounds (Thanks, Reader B.).
- A fun exploit of font ligatures → Scunthorpe Sans “censors bad language automatically,” kind of. ※ You do know about the Scunthorpe Problem, right?
- I can’t resist a snail mail campaign for something good. Nor should you. → 18 Million Thanks
- Today in 1866, composer and pianist Erik Satie is born in London. Satie, smarting from being called a “clumsy but subtle technician,” began calling himself a phonometrician or gymnopedist. The latter word, coined by Satie, was perhaps an oblique reference to the ancient Greek festival (or dance) called the Gymnopaedia. Whatever the origins, Satie would soon write the composition he is best known for, the ► Gymnopédies (which you will surely recognize). ¶ Satie was a bit…different. Among other eccentricities, Satie claimed to live on a diet of white food, hoarded umbrellas, carried a hammer for protection, stacked two grand pianos on top of each other in his flat (using the top for correspondence), founded his own religion, and composed pieces like “Vexations,” a piece intended to be played 840 times in succession. Satie’s influence was significant, particularly on experimental artists like John Cage and minimalists like Steve Reich. Satie’s years of heavy drinking—including a fondness for absinthe—took their toll, and he would die at just 59. ※ Listen to Satie’s ► Gnossiennes, beautiful pieces that remind me of a modernist Chopin. ※ Watch the documentary Erik Satie: Things Seen to the Right and the Left. ※ Listen to Gnossiennes No. 1 Forever, a composition that uses Markov Chains to create an endless version of this beautiful piece. ※ Listen to every recording of Gymnopedie No. 1 at the same time. ※ Listen to the complete “Vexations” (clocks in at nearly 10 hours).
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Links, links, links…from a certain, uncertain mind.
Links: May 10, 2020
- Don’t let the mundane title fool you…this flip book is stupendous, dark and beautiful. Thanks, Reader S. → I made a really big flip book during quarantine ※ Flipbook Gangnam Style -vs- Psy Gangnam Style
- At the always entertaining Strong Language, the curious history of the Sofa King. → It’s Sofa King famous!
- “It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.” → The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months ※ ► Golding’s Introduction to Lord of the Flies
- “…a single player iPad game where players help NASA classify coral reefs…” → NeMO-Net
- The Pudding has been on fire lately. Take a musical quiz because it’s interesting, and contribute to identifying “generational gaps in music” at the same time. Also, I totally have Gen-Zers beat when it comes to recognizing Taylor Dane. → Music Challenge
- The uplifting story of Emerson, age 11, and her mail carrier, Doug. Also, if you’re an American, support the USPS! → Emerson and Mail Carrier Doug. ※ Instead of Killing the US Postal System, Let’s Expand It
- Reader P. says, “Apparently this is a real thing.” → Jean-Michel Basquiat Barbie ※ Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines virtual exhibit
- I agree with Reader B. that some of these are really good! → A thread of user-made Penguin Classics covers. ※ The Penguin (or Oxford World) Classics Cover Generator.
- Maybe? → It’s time to take UFOs seriously. Seriously.
- Today in 2003, as an entry in its ongoing (since June 20, 1995!) Astronomy Picture of the Day series, NASA publishes a picture of NGC 7293: The Helix Nebula, which would come to be known as “The Eye of God.” Taken by the Hubble Telescope, the nearly 11,000-year-old nebula—also known as “The Eye of Sauron”—is approximately 700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Contrary to the eye-like appearance from Earth, the nebula is believed to be cylindrical, our view being “down” the cylinder to the star at its center. Further imagery of the nebula revealed that it contains at least 10,000 comets swarming around, and often colliding with each other, inside it.
Links: May 3, 2020
- Some mind blowing glimpses of the future with fascinating implications. Jukebox uses neural nets to generate music—and even “rudimentary” singing!— in multiple genres and styles. Vocal Synthesis is trained on the speech and speech patterns to create new audio (from a “special message” from Barak Obama and Donald Trump to Jay-Z performing Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”). ¶ As these kinds of programs rapidly improve, theoretical questions of copyright (who “owns” the copyright of an AI-generated voice performance?) and life (how do we tell real from literally fake news?) become real and pressing. ※ See also: From the pyramids to Apollo 11 — can AI ever rival human creativity? ※ One more link, this time a bit less world-changing: This Meme Does Not Exist.
- Even right here, people (and birds), live in different worlds. A pair of them: There’s an Entire Industry Dedicated to Making Foods Crispy, and It Is WILD and Inside the Outrageously Prestigious World of Falcon Influencers.
- I love this project! Check it out while you can: This Website Will Self-Destruct
- The King’s Letters, the fascinating story of “The 15th-century scholar who upset the Korean aristocracy by creating a native script for the Korean language, and thus wean it off Chinese characters.” ※ Pairs well with: The origin of language in the brain is 20 million years older than we thought.
- I Turned a 1920’s Typewriter into an EDM Drum Machine.
- Yes, I’m the kind of person that, in the midst of a pandemic, worries over such things. Maybe this is why: COVID or Covid? The comfort of pedantry at a time of national crisis. ※ See also, the Chicago Manual’s shop talk on the Styling COVID-19 and Related Terms. ※ And in sign language, literally: Due to Covid 19
- A life well lived: Madeline Kripke, Doyenne of Dictionaries, Is Dead at 76
- How Soviet Artists Imagined Communist Life in Space. ※ Bonus: Nikolai Mikhailovich Kolchitsky’s fantastic illustrations.
- First, consider that there is a “literary magazine for Taco Bell literature.” Then enjoy an interview with the editor of Taco Bell Quarterly, who explains how to make art out of a fast food brand.
- Today in 1469, writer, philosopher and diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli is born in Florence, Italy. Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, who would be the ruler of Florence from 1516-1519. Machiavelli’s book has been celebrated and condemned in the centuries since for its formal innovation, philosophical subtlety and its seeming recommendation of cruelty, autocracy and deception. The latter perception—a partially unfair one driven by partisan interests including the Catholic church—resulted in the eponym Machiavellian (one who prefers expedience and desired outcome to morality; deceitful, cunning, scheming, duplicitous) as early as the 1570s.
Links: April 26, 2020
- How the Fake Beatles Conned South America.
- The readaletter tag on YouTube is delightful, with all kinds of people (celebrities and not) reading letters to friends, family and the public. ※ Staying with letters, read about The Stamp that Almost Caused a War .
- No one knows, and can more accessibly talk about, new and emerging online language than Because Internet author Gretchen McCullough, and this new interview is no exception: Why “Ok.” Is the Most Terrifying Text You Could Ever Receive.
- FixMyQuarantine links to interesting videos, songs, articles, useless facts and uplifting news intended to “help people escape boredom of staying at home.” Even better, the selection changes every 24 hours. Thanks Reader S.
- Weaving together the ideas of Marcel Maus and Lewis Hyde on gifts and the gifted with the contemporary, mercenary market and notions of a spiritual economy, Ted Gioia’s Gratuity: Who Gets Paid When Art Is Free is a must read.
- Unlike almost everyone else I know, I couldn’t bear Tiger King. But this not-so-depressing or salacious piece on The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People was great.
- Speaking of animals: Pets in prison: the rescue dogs teaching Californian inmates trust and responsibility. ※ Pairs well with: We Put Too Many People Behind Bars. This Pandemic Shows Why That’s Not Necessary.
- Looking for some big books to occupy your time? Then The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Over 500 Pages is for you. ※ And if you’re one of those tricksters who find pandemic reading pleasurable (or necessary), then the inimitable Bryan Alexander has your back: Reading for the plague: a syllabus.
- For your eyes: The weirdest, most wonderful virtual museums you can visit without leaving your couch & An inspired photographer, a disrupted senior class and 500 portraits that capture what they lost. ※ For your ears, a bit of nostalgia: 10 TV themes played on piano by Ethan Iverson. ※ And for, well, the rest of you: Burning Man Is Going Virtual, and So Are the Orgies.
- On this day in 1986, the worst nuclear disaster in history—along with the Fukushima Daiichi disaster the only incident rated at the highest level on the International Nuclear Event Scale—occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in what is now northern Ukraine. The accident would release 100 times more radiation than both of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, killing two plant workers immediately and more than two-dozen first responders within a few months. The ultimate death toll, including eventual deaths from cancer and other diseases, could reach 16,000. More than 350,000 people in Pripyat and nearby areas were relocated, turning Pripyat into a ghost town. After putting out the immediate fire and shutting the rest of the plant down, the reactor was covered by a 400,000 cubic meter concrete and steel structure called the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Sarcophagus but, due to degradation, the sarcophagus was replaced in 2018 by the New Shelter. ※ See also: Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl (a short film shot by drone in 2014), a Traveler piece on What It’s Like to Visit Chernobyl Today, and the acclaimed Chernobyl miniseries.
Links: April 19, 2020
- Trained a neural net on my cat and regret everything
- There’s a slew of streaming media by entertainers of all kinds right now, including comedy, but Tip Your Waitstaff is one of the more interesting. Each week Mike Birbiglia and a guest (so far including John Mulaney, Gary Gulman, Maria Bamford and more) get together to work on jokes, which is both fascinating and funny.
- Nick Cave on creativity in the age of the Coronavirus | David Lynch Predicts a ‘More Spiritual, Much Kinder’ World After Quarantine Ends | John Keats wrote A Letter from Quarantine.
- Color Names is a collaborative effort to name all (16,277,216) RGB colors based on user-submitted names and voting. Meanwhile, colors.lol selects palettes from which sets and names are randomly generated, leading to combinations such as “ungentlemanly light grey, deadly muted blue and entopic periwinkle.” | More seriously, this two-part piece on The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains is eye-opening and pairs well with this 2012 Radiolab episode on Colors.
- Thanks to the #ColourOurCollections initiative you can download coloring book pages based on materials from libraries, archives and museums from around the world.
- As my ability to pseudo-multitask becomes weaker—and the sheltering in place becomes staler—I find myself using ambient sound/noise systems more to help concentrate and focus. My current pick is the Name of the Rose Ambient Background Generator, just one of more than 200 customizable sound generators at MyNoise. A few other recommended sites: Rainyscope for rain sounds, Coffitivity for coffeeshop sounds and Soft Murmur for a mixable variety.
- From the early days of commercial printing comes comes an extraordinary saga of piracy and fraud.
- The news is getting old,but the language of, and around, Coronavirus remains fascinating. A mini-roundup of articles on the topic: A “Lockdown Lexicon, Covidictionary, Glossary of Coronacoinages” in two parts: #CORONASPEAK — the language of Covid-19 goes viral & #CORONASPEAK — the language of Covid-19 goes viral — 2 | Social change and linguistic change: the language of Covid-19 | Corpus analysis of the language of Covid-19 | Coronavirus meets linguistic diversity | ‘Take care and be safe’: Rewriting email etiquette in our new coronavirus reality | and a bit of fun, the Covid-19 Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
- For your ears: Matthew Perpetua’s curated yearly playlists (1970-2005) | A Buddhist Monk Covers Queen, The Beatles, and The Ramones | Rare footage of a Snow leopard calling. For your eyes: 2020 Sony World Photography Awards | 50 Weirdest Stock Photos You Won’t Be Able To Unsee. For both: Louis Armstrong House Museum’s first virtual exhibit.
- Today in 1770, while the barely 15-year-old Marie Antoinette was being married by proxy to Louis XVI of France, Captain James Cook—on a mission to find the mythical continent of Terra Australis—becomes the first European to lay eyes on the Eastern coast of Australia.
Links: April 12, 2020
- There’s hope for the pandas → Finally, Some Privacy: After 10 Years, Giant Pandas Mate in Shuttered Zoo … and for us? → Thanks to COVID-19, Internet-Connected Sex Toy Sales Are Booming
- It turns out tunnel-boring machines are far from, well, boring. → Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines
- A promising early experiment that may become more important than ever. → A Brain Stimulation Experiment Relieved Depression in Nearly All of Its Participants | Paradoxical pairing: If You Have Anxiety and Depression but Feel Better During Coronavirus, You’re Not Alone
- If you’re an introvert jonesing for some of the stress of extroverting, Hyphal Mesh has you covered, every Tuesday at 12:30 PT / 3:30 ET.
- Paper-Bag Masks from 50 Years Ago
- People are finding delight in all kinds of things right now. Is it time to discover delight in the dead?
- The Letterform Archive is a (well) “curated collection of over 50,000 items related to lettering, typography, calligraphy, and graphic design.” And now the online archive is open to all.
- Some long(ish) reads: The Mortician and the Murderer | a bank-robbing Olympic cyclist naturally uses his bike as a getaway vehicle | The highly unusual company behind Sriracha, the world’s coolest hot sauce | How a tiny endangered species put a man in prison | The Crazy True Story of the Zanesville Zoo Escape
- Get ’em in your ears: NPR’s updated list of virtual concerts of all kinds | the Cabin Fever Tunes schedule of folk/country/americana livestreams | Nightly Met Opera streams. And your eyes: The Art Of Quarantine | Unraveling the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt’s Spellbinding Mummy Portraits | Jonathan Harris’ works. And a bit of both with the ongoing Social Distancing Festival.
- Today in 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space on a voyage lasting 108 minutes. At lift-off, Gagarin spoke to ground control, saying “Off we go! Goodbye, until [we meet] soon, dear friends!” The first phrase, Poyekhali! in Russian (listen to it)—popularly translated as “Let’s go!” or “We’re off!”—became a popular phrase that is now a regular part of the Russian lexicon. See also: a ► 5-minute mini-documentary of the historic event, a nice piece on how Gagarin inspired Soviet design, Poyekhali! Gagarin cut, a collaboration between composer Úlfur Eldjárn and filmmaker Christopher Riley celebrating astronaut Tim Peake’s first orbit of Earth in 2015, and the finally-revealed true story of Gagarin’s death in 1968.
Links: April 21, 2019
- “Breithaupt is alarmed at the apparent new virus of selective empathy and how it’s deepening divisions. If we embrace it, he says, then ‘basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.'” → The End Of Empathy
- Each load of the the LOC Serendipity page provides a new random list of links to openly available books and other publications from the Library of Congress. Makes for a fun meander. ※ Even more fun, if you have a short attention span like mine, is the companion LOC Visual Media Serendipity site.
- “What are human murmurations, I wondered?” Another insightful essay by Rebecca Solnit. → When the Hero is the Problem [Thanks, Reader B.!]
- The San Diego Zoo and the University of California San Diego are crowdfunding a cervix-navigating robot to fight against the impending extinction of multiple species of African Rhino. ※ Watch ► the project’s video
- The nutrition study the \$30B supplement industry doesn’t want you to see
- If your interests run to technology, social media, attention, unplugging, etc., then Venkatesh Rao’s thoughts on “Waldenponding” (I suggest starting with Part 2, grokkable even if Harry Potter isn’t your thing, then Part 1 if you’re interested) are an intriguing read.
- Lenka Clayton Typewriter Drawings (“made with a portable 1957 Smith-Corona Skyriter typewriter” — but how?) ※ Clayton has a [lot of interesting projects of all kinds](), but I am naturally drawn to the wordy ones, such as Corrected Love Letters, Today I was interviewed by the New York Times, Unanswered Letter and a project I shared here in 2015, the Mysterious Letters Project.
- Ummm…hmmm. → Woman with two wombs gives birth twice, nearly a month apart
- 5fathom is just a person sharing “things rich and strange,” and it’s a cornucopia of little delights.
- Today is Easter, aka Pascha, aka Resurrection Sunday, a Christian holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Easter Sunday is the first day of Eastertide, the Easter Season, which lasts seven weeks, ending on day 50, Pentecost Sunday. The dying of Easter eggs originates in the early Christian community of Mesopotamia, who dyed eggs—an ancient symbol of birth and rebirth—red in memory of the blood of Christ. In addition to being an ancient fertility symbol, the hare was widely believed to be hermaphroditic and so able to reproduce without losing its virginity, which led to its being associated with the Virgin Mary and to the German Lutherans casting of the hare in the part of a judge—similar to Santa Claus—who determined if children had been naughty or nice at the start of Eastertide. In Western Christianity, which follows the Gregorian calendar, Easter is a “moveable feast” that can fall anywhere between March 22 and April 25; in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which follows the Julian calendar, it falls on a Sunday between April 4 and May 8.
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